ABSTRACT
Education has been a key research site for the development of Discourse Studies in Uruguay. Previous CDA-informed research analyzed issues of policy discourse and programs for educational media, such as textbooks, teachers’ guides, and classroom interaction and learning (Canale 2019).
In this chapter, I analyze current social processes of the depoliticization of education (Freire 1992) in Uruguay which react against gender and sexuality education. In order to critique anti-gendered discourses, which counter the efforts to depoliticize mainstream education, I analyze how the State-funded and State-sponsored production of a teacher guide for gender and sexual education for primary school children met with anti-gendered discourses in parliament and the mass media. Through strategies of decontextualization, misreporting, and even discursive manipulation, politicians, religious groups, and conservative parents’ movements and organizations construed this teaching guide as unconstitutional, discriminatory, and even zoophilic. My findings point to the current backlash against gender and sexuality rights in the region and show the different forms in which this backlash can be manifested in local education. They also point to how this backlash fuels a broader ideological struggle between conservative and progressive education.
